The Scientist Is Gone, But Not His Book Tour

By EDWARD WYATT

Published: April 7, 2005

It is a problem that might have puzzled the great physicist himself: how to conduct an author tour when the author is, well, not exactly available.

The author and physicist in this case are one and the same: Richard P. Feynman, the Nobel Prize laureate who, next to Albert Einstein, is one of the world's most recognizable scientists and one of the few whose written works have consistently made the best-seller lists.

His memoirs of his days with the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos and his lucid explanations of the mysteries of quantum electrodynamics have long appealed to readers beyond the pocket-protector set. But even Feynman's publisher, Basic Books, acknowledges that it is taking a risk this month in publishing ''Perfectly Reasonable Deviations From the Beaten Track: The Letters of Richard P. Feynman,'' a collection of previously uncirculated personal letters.

''We want to see a national best seller here,'' said David Steinberger, president and chief executive of Perseus Books Group, the parent of Basic Books. ''That is a challenge when you're talking about letters from a dead guy.''

Feynman, whose telegenic presence made him a sought-after speaker, was always his own best advertisement. But his death in 1988 made an author tour to promote the new book problematic, at best.

The solution is one that Feynman himself might admire: the ''authorless book tour,'' a series of panel discussions with scientists, several of them Nobel laureates, who were close to Feynman. Last month, three of them addressed a standing-room-only crowd at the Los Angeles Public Library. At least five more sessions are scheduled, beginning tonight in Seattle and following this month and next in San Francisco, Chicago, Boston and New York.

The panel discussions will be augmented by readings and book signings by Michelle Feynman, Feynman's daughter, who edited and wrote an introduction to the new collection of letters. (A schedule is available at www.basicfeynman.com.)

While big sales of such a book might be a challenge, they are not out of the question. Basic Books estimates that there are at least 30,000 people who, as one executive put it, ''will buy anything with Feynman's name on it.'' Several of Feynman's earlier works have also been best sellers, including three published after his death: ''What Do You Care What Other People Think?'' (W.W. Norton, 1988), ''The Meaning of It All,'' (Perseus, 1998) and ''The Pleasure of Finding Things Out'' (Perseus, 1999). ''The Feynman Lectures on Physics'' volumes, meanwhile, are a staple for budding scientists.

Basic Books is also making a hefty investment in the project. It scheduled a large first printing of 50,000 copies, is reissuing four of Feynman's earlier works and says it intends to spend roughly $125,000 publicizing the effort.

Feynman's appeal has long come from his ability to make the most complicated science understandable. He wowed the nation in 1986 when, as a member of the government commission investigating the Challenger space shuttle disaster, he dunked a piece of O-ring material into a glass of ice water, showing how it became brittle at freezing temperatures -- and thereby illustrating one theory of why the Challenger exploded.

''The Challenger episode brought him to the attention of a lot of people who wouldn't have otherwise known who he was,'' said Douglas D. Osheroff, a Stanford professor who shared the Nobel Prize in physics in 1996 and who took part in the Los Angeles panel discussion.

Among more specialized audiences, of course, Feynman is far better known. ''When I was at Caltech, Feynman was God, pretty much,'' Mr. Osheroff said, referring to the California Institute of Technology, which he attended and where Feynman taught from 1950 to the end of his career.

Feynman had a reputation as an iconoclast, a bongo-playing intellectual with a short fuse who quarreled frequently with colleagues. He was also thought to be a bit of ''a skirt chaser,'' said Virginia Trimble, a professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine, who as a graduate student at Caltech posed for Feynman when he took up figure drawing.

''But he had a half-hidden strength of real decency and kindness,'' Ms. Trimble said. ''He had the knack for making science feel important and exciting, and he inspired very large numbers of people to be excited about physics.''

The newly published letters unveil previously hidden aspects of vintage Feynman episodes, like his increasingly dogged campaign to resign from the National Academy of Sciences -- over the objections of the academy's officers -- as well as previously untold and revealing scenes of his personal side.

Here are letters of thanks to those who congratulated him on winning the Nobel Prize, including notes exchanged with a former science teacher in New York who reminded Feynman of ''the days when you used to pedal your bike from old P.S. 39 down to the new high school and ask me for some experiments to do.''

Another letter responds to a high school student who asked for advice on how to prepare for a career in physics. ''Among the many things I know little about, one is what one should do to prepare oneself to be a theoretical physicist,'' Feynman responded. ''P.S. Try taking my Feynman lectures out of the library.''

Also included is his description, in a letter to his mother, of the test of the world's first atomic bomb, a few days after it occurred in the New Mexico desert. (''No dark glasses for me,'' he wrote.) And his achingly passionate letter to his wife, Arline, written more than a year after her death from tuberculosis: ''You, dead, are so much better than anyone else alive.''

In an interview, Michelle Feynman, 36, said the experience of editing the letters and hearing the responses from people who attended the panel discussion in Los Angeles ''made something very clear: I don't think any of us really knew the same person.''

Ms. Feynman, who is a photographer and who with her brother, Carl, has helped to oversee her father's estate, said she believed this book made her father feel ''kinder and more accessible.''

Many of the previously published books by or about her father ''haven't quite gotten the man I knew,'' she said. ''The difference between this book and a lot of other books, even those that are some of my favorites, is that those books have been edited. Here, if we chose a letter we put it in in its entirety.''

And these letters, she wrote in the volume's introduction, ''are testimony to his skill and desire to be plainly understood -- and, of course, to his passion and curiosity about the world.''

Photos: Richard P. Feynman, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, about 1960. (Photo by American Institute of Physics/Niels Bohr Library); Michelle Feynman, who edited a new book of her father's letters. (Photo by Ana Elisa Fuentes for The New York Times); Richard Feynman, center, on a family trip in Mexico in 1978. (Photo by Alice Leighton)(pg. E8)